


Not a House or Even a Tent

by toujours_nigel



Series: Conditions Best Suited [6]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 12:16:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1428145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>wedding-night fic</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not a House or Even a Tent

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Margaret Atwood's 'Habitation'.

“I’m a sailor,” Ralph said, and took Laurie’s hands carefully. He was wearing both gloves today, and it was strange to feel the difference in them: under the leather one could feel the suppleness of flesh and muscle in his right hand, and it contrasted queerly with the rigidity of the left.

“Come into the house,” Laurie said very gently, and led him up the stairs to the porch. He’d freed only his right hand from Ralph’s slackening grasp, and they went in the door hand-fast.

The house was quiet and curiously empty. His mother’s things had been packed into crates and packing-cases and taken to the vicarage under Mrs. Timming’s orders while they’d been lingering at the reception. Upstairs his old room waited unkempt, though ten to one Aunt Olive would have spent a few minutes fussing over the mess before she left to catch her train. Well, they were all his rooms now, really. It was his house, and he’d meant what he‘d told Ralph, that it looked different. He’d always been the one leaving, till now.

“It suits you,” Ralph said, “but I shan’t ask for the tour just now. You look about done in. Where can we sit?”

 

The divan had been made up and the room set to rights. Firelight lapped at the walls, making the closeness of the room seem comfortable, and a trace of his mother’s Chanel lingered in the air. Of course she would have walked about the house once before leaving it; Mr. Straike might even have waited for her here, doubtless harrumphing fondly at her sentimentalities. It wasn’t healthy to hate a man so much for the commission of no earthly crime: it was the sort of feeling their sergeants had tried to whip up in them about the Germans. God, what good did it do?

Laurie walked to the divan, careful not to limp or show pain, and stared blankly around. The blackout had moved an inch from the window-frame nearest his hand, betraying firelight to their eyes outside; he twitched it back into place and said, “Let’s not have the lights on.”

Ralph, who had been making his way across the room to the switchboard, nodded at the edge of his vision and retreated to lean against the doorframe. Laurie thought of how horrified his mother would have been at his utter lack of hospitality and common manners and very determinedly did not ask Ralph to sit down.

At least the house was his. Laurie had always been absently fond of the place, but it had been for a long time a place to come back to during the hols. and miss in a vague sort of way in the gaps and quiet moments of other occupations. Now he was glad of possessing it with a hungering sort of love he hardly recognised for the grief it was. He transmuted it into a fierce, hollow joy: it was his house and he wouldn’t sell it if at all he could hang on to it; other people might occupy it for some time, but it would remain his, as his grandfather had intended. It was only right. It was his in more than name; it held all his memories of home, and it fit him to the hilt: it was comforting to be in it and, he thought rather self-consciously, aware in the instant of articulation of the silliness of it, the divan was the right height and took the weight off his knee. It had been hurting for a good while, and he was not too far gone to know that the sudden relief from pain added significantly to his love of the house.

“I want to get blind drunk,” he informed Ralph. “And I wish you’d sit down.”

“Off champagne?” Ralph laughed. “Well, we certainly can try. No, don’t get up; I think I can find the kitchen on my own.”

He hadn’t spoken much, but Laurie felt his absence quite keenly. He wanted very little less than to be alone: having spent considerable energy in denying what his mother’s wedding meant to him, he was finding it hard going to cope with its sudden impact. His plans of a cosseted convalescence had relied on her presence, and, though he had sincerely hoped to find himself conformable till Andrew’s vital presence rid his mind of such manoeuvrings and self-deceptions, she had always been the world’s most important woman to him. That she could leave him at all had struck at the core of his being, but that she could do so light-heartedly and not consider it a betrayal fatally wounded his ego. He wanted to be shored-up, convinced that he meant the world to someone, but he was not conscious of any of this, staring at the line where his lit-up feet disappeared into his shadowed legs. He knew only that there was a curious vacancy at the heart of him that ached to be filled up.

Ralph came in with two wine-glasses and popped their magnum of champagne. In a room where only their breath filled the air the sounds were loud and started Laurie from his reverie. Ralph handed him a frothing glass and asked, “Shall we toast?”

“To the Straikes? Rather not.” He drank half of it in a gulp and blinked. “It’s boiling in here.”

Ralph stood looking down at him for a long moment before nodding decisively. “It is. I tried leaving the door open but it swung shut. D’you mind?”

It became immediately obvious that the question had been a formality. Ralph doffed his uniform jacket and placed it, folded neatly, over the back of a chair. He hesitated before starting on his gloves, and Laurie thought he understood what the decision had been about. The second the gloves were off, Ralph had stuck his hands in his pockets.

“I don’t care,” Laurie said. It was absurd, when Ralph had come all this way for him, to expect him to balk at so little. And really he didn’t mind it, or not enough to tell Ralph.

Ralph smiled. “No? Well, don’t glare, I believe you. Let me get the boot off, in any event.”

He knelt before Laurie could protest, both hands out now, and sure on the laces of his boot. His head gleamed gold in the firelight, and Laurie was conscious of a deep pang of yearning. He told himself that it was simply that he missed Andrew, and that Ralph had come for him at such short notice, and that he was lonely and vulnerable and seeing the old photograph in the morning had left him in a tangle. It wasn’t about Ralph at all.

Ralph looked up at him with the boot in one hand. “It’s a sight better than the first muck-job they had you in,” he observed, turning it over, coolly interested in its workmanship. “How’s your knee?”

It had been terrible for some time now, with the long stretch of standing and the walk over rough, uncertain ground in the afternoon. Still, Laurie reflected, it had held up much better than it would have before the boot and physiotherapy. “Not as horrible as I’d have thought a month ago.”

Ralph laughed. “Honest Spuddy. You must have made an excellent corporal. ‘Atrocious, sir, but not as atrocious as expected.’ Do you have your dope on you?”

Laurie, an old hand at hospitals and not overly handicapped by his newness in the Bridstow hospital, had cadged two doses from the night nurse and had the first surreptitiously the previous night for fear of making his mother anxious. With the memory of that in the front of his mind it felt strange to chase the other down with champagne and have Ralph nod approvingly at him.

Ralph muttered “Good lad,”, just as if Laurie had been a twerp needing encouragement, and twisted easily to put the boot away beside the fireplace. By the time he’d turned back Laurie had stepped out of its companion and begun to shrug out of his blouse. He’d put on an old jumper underneath it to brace himself for the chill in the morning air and now felt uncomfortably warm. Emerging from its neck, he looked away from Ralph’s sardonic stare, but Ralph only took the blouse from him and shook it out properly. When he managed to look up again Ralph had drawn a veil over the look till it signified only amusement.

Laurie said, “I’m one ahead of you. Drink up, won’t you?” He added, because Ralph was beginning to like the edge of the mantelpiece entirely too much, “And sit down, damn you.”

Ralph said, very mildly, “Of course, my dear.” He took the other wine-glass and sat on the floor, considering the rim of it with some care. Presently he tipped it towards Laurie, and announced, “To surviving our parents”, which wasn’t what Laurie had expected at all, but was apt enough that he tilted his drink at Ralph in acknowledgement and drained the dregs of it. Ralph lifted the corner of his mouth in a smile, took Laurie’s glass, refilled it and handed it back in a single smooth motion before turning his attention to his own drink.

Laurie drank it nervelessly, the bubbles tickling his palate. It was an unpleasant thought, and one didn’t like to think it, but Ralph had the right of it after all. You survived your parents as best as you could and hoped they hadn’t done you much harm. Of course Ralph would know, with how brutally the truth had been made plain to him, and Laurie was a grown man living in relative comfort and not a penniless boy turned out of home and school, but in the end that was what you had to do. You survived your parents and hoped your children could survive you. At least there’d be none of that bit of nonsense. What heavy weather he was making of something he ought to be glad about, really. He fished the bottle from its resting place at the crook of Ralph’s knee and poured another drink.

“I looked around the house a little, quite by accident while looking for the kitchen,” Ralph was saying in a story-telling tone, when Laurie emerged from his funk. “It suits you, really. If I’d had to imagine a house for you I doubt I’d have done any different.” He smiled a little, rather distantly, as if acknowledging Laurie’s reversion to reality. “Have you always lived here?”

“Yes,” Laurie stumbled, “or at least, I know we lived somewhere else before my parents divorced, but I can’t remember the place at all. When I was in prep school I used to sleep here nights so I could have my dog with me. He wasn’t allowed upstairs, you see.”

“Yes, I see,” Ralph said, and smiled charmingly. It was a practiced smile and made Laurie stiffen like a cat stroked the wrong way. Ralph seemed to realise he’d mis-stepped somehow; when he spoke next his voice was brisk and light. “Though I suppose you’d the windows open then. Pity one can’t do the same now.”

“We’d freeze without the fire,” Laurie said. “If it was summer we could have tried it.” In the summer he’d been lying in the mud at Dunkirk, and Ralph had been sailing just off it. Abruptly, he asked, “Were you in love with him?”

“With _Bunny_?” Ralph asked incredulously. “No, I see. Yes, I suppose I was, or near enough. One can’t always tell of course, and danger and close quarters simulate the terror of it rather well, but yes, I think so. Why?”

He had already assumed that the answer had to do with Andrew, and it would have been easy to let him think it. But it was impossible to talk to Ralph about Andrew now, and it wasn’t true in any case. It hadn’t been Andrew Laurie’d thought of. “I really didn’t remember sending you up. Reg... he’s the one who got you... told me later.”

Ralph frowned, but seemed inclined to accept the diversion. “You didn’t get in trouble for that later, did you?”

Just like Ralph to think of that. “No. He told everyone I was too out of it to realise you were a man, even with the beard. And Reg’s a good sort, really. He doesn’t mind what I am.”

”Kind of him.” Ralph smiled wryly at Laurie’s stricken look and shook his head, the hair falling a little out of its regimented order. “No, unfair to Spud. I do mean that. Sometimes you do get these men, who have a high capacity for accepting the flaws and foibles of others without thinking less of them. You get them in every sort of place, even if you’ve been told not to expect anything of the kind.”

The thing to do, Laurie thought, was to look at the very real kindness of that and overlook the condescension. With some effort to be quiet about it, he said, “He didn’t take it as a flaw.”

“No? Well, my dear, I’m glad for that. I worried about you in hospital. Not very much to begin with, but later one had the time for it. You’ve been in hospital, you know. I’m glad the letter didn’t reach you, it was the most abominable tripe and sentimentality. Must have been doped when I wrote it. Some things don’t stand a sober eye.”

It must have been of the same stripe as the curiously self-conscious, boyish beginning to the letter that had come to him in hospital. But Laurie thought that he’d have liked a look at it all the same, Ralph hid too much away under the veneer of humour. “It’s a little ridiculous to apologise for having been thought dead, isn’t it?”

“Extremely. My dear, I’m not angling for an apology.”

It wasn’t, Laurie thought with a growing exasperation, like him to be so damnably obtuse. No help for it, then. “I would have liked to read that letter.”

Ralph pushed himself to his feet in a fluid move that Laurie hated, and took a quick turn about the room, coming to a stop facing the divan. “Drink up, Spud. It was all sentimental piffle. They had me on excellent dope.”

Laurie drank obediently. It was strange how things came back to one. Seven years ago, in the vacation between terms he had slept in this room one night with Gyp nosing at his bare feet and dreamt of Ralph, who had only ever been Lanyon in those days, even in his dreams. If someone had told that boy that he would ever feel conflicted about Ralph writing him a letter full of sentimental piffle he wouldn’t have believed them. Laurie found it hard to believe himself. He said, very quietly and half to himself, “A letter from you? You bet I’d have wanted to read it. Especially then. You’ve been in hospital, you know what it’s like.”

The firelight limned Ralph from foot to waist. His shoulders were dappled and his face cast into shade: his eyes were darkly bright, and his hair looked the dusty gold of museum antiques. His left hand was gripping the mantle convulsively; his knuckles pressed starkly against the stretched skin. Very gently, he said, “It would have made things difficult for you later, my dear.”

Laurie felt slow and stupid, like trying to read an engrossing book the pages of which were flipping too fast. He had not thought to want this, but he had been keeping himself from knowing what he wanted for too long for any sort of certainty to be possible. “I don’t know,” he said. “It feels as though it had anyway.”

Ralph was too far away, inscrutable and looming. Laurie wanted to pull him to his knees and, simultaneously, perversely, thought he had never looked more himself than right then in the flickering shadows. It was impossible to see the lines engraved on his face, the tightness around his eyes. “What _do_ you know?”

Though he would have sworn that he had forgotten that conversation entirely, Laurie answered, almost by rote, “I know about myself.” Exasperated, he added, “Sit down, would you?”

He had half expected Ralph to sit on the floor again, but he perched on the divan instead, quite close, and when Laurie would have swung his leg off and sat upright, caught it by the ankle and stretched it out again, over his own. His hand rested on Laurie’s knee, kneading it out carefully. “You’ve bitched it up with all the walking. Tell me if this does any good.”

It felt wonderful, though Laurie suspected it would have anyway. It had been so long since anybody had touched him with any interest beyond the severely clinical: the war had stripped the memories of Charles of any substance, and just now the fleeting kiss he’d shared with Andrew seemed to have existed in a different world that was just as unreal. Ralph was touching him very carefully, the grip of his hand on Laurie’s knee the only place their bare skin came into contact. In bare truth it was no different than physiotherapy, or oughtn’t have been. But Laurie’s skin prickled at the touch, and he was far too aware of his bare leg against Ralph’s uniform trousers, and of Ralph’s eyes on him. The rest of him was held severely in check, but his look warmed Laurie through. “I haven’t thanked you for coming all this way for me. It was childish of me to ask.”

”I’m glad you did,” Ralph said, fitting the tips of his fingers into the groove beneath Laurie’s knee. “Bend this for me. That’s got better since I did this last. She’s rather good, Alec’s always given me to understand. I went to someone quite different, and I’m afraid I’ve been lax in following his orders. You should learn from my sins.”

“Ralph.” It came out low and rough and quite unlike what he’d intended. He swallowed and tried again. “Ralph.”

“Don’t let it weigh on you,” Ralph said. “It’s the least I could do.” Something of Laurie’s incredulity must have shown on his face. Ralph grinned boyishly, and temporised, “It’s the least I’d do for you, at least.”

“You’re too good to me. I’m not worth so much.”

Ralph was still smiling, his grip on Laurie’s knee turned possessive. “Let me judge that. Spud. I shan’t assume that you know...”

It seemed to Laurie awful beyond belief that he should say it and be met with silence. “I know,” he interposed hurriedly. “Ralph.”

Ralph was watching him with eyes that had gone distant and wary. “I’ll help you make up the divan,” he said. “Have you got a bed I can use?”

It should have relieved him, but the withdrawal of that warm regard left Laurie feeling empty. He had asked Ralph to come to him, been glad of him, _proud_ of him, all while pushing to the margins the knowledge of what it meant, to Ralph and, damningly, to him. No, he thought, whatever might come of it he couldn’t pretend, even to himself, that he had wanted Ralph here only as a friend. “It isn’t that. I do love you,” he insisted, surprised while saying it that it was true.

Ralph took the hand closest him and kissed the knuckles. “Spuddy. _Laurie_ ”

Laurie turned his hand to grip Ralph by the wrist and draw him closer. The kiss when it happened was short and unexpectedly shy, Ralph pressing their mouths together for a moment before drawing back to watch Laurie’s face. His hand pressed hard on Laurie’s thigh, above the mess of his knee.

“Again,” Laurie said, and dragged him back by the tie.

This kiss went on longer, and was considerably less careful. When he was nearly out of breath Ralph relinquished his mouth and kissed across his jaw and down his throat. Laurie stared at the flames, drawing breath in ragged gasps and trying to hold still, to clutch onto Ralph, to do anything but shake apart. The quiet kiss in the hospital kitchen faded entirely under the assault of immediate sensation, and Laurie, grasping at the threads of coherence, thought that lust had after all never signified prominently in his love for Andrew. It had been Ralph he had dreamt of.

Presently it became impossible to think. Ralph kissed the point of his jaw, his convulsing throat, closed his teeth briefly on the drawn-tight tendon of Laurie’s neck and gentled the momentary sting by laving at the irritated skin. “I shan’t leave any marks that might be seen,” he promised with a laugh in his voice. “How thoroughly _do_ you get checked over?”

The eyes he raised to Laurie’s were shining bright. Laurie felt his heart turn over. “Not that thoroughly,” he promised. “But we’d better pull the mattress to the floor now.”

Dragging the mattress in place before the fire and making up the bed ought to have created an awkwardness in a friendship so newly altered, but it felt the most natural thing to shift over to allow Ralph space as he knelt on the edge of their makeshift bed. Laurie had tugged his tie out of shape, and he had rolled his sleeves up for the move, his wrists tanned golden like his throat, and the rest of him paling beautifully to the rumpled white of his shirt. He gleamed in the light. Laurie wanted to devour him with a suddenness which would have been shocking if he had not seen it reflected in Ralph’s eyes, echoed in the eager way he moved. They reached for each other in the same moment and fell together through luck as much as good management, Laurie’s lame leg bracketed between Ralph’s thighs, Ralph’s fair head nestled in the crook of Laurie’s shoulder, his hands busy on the buttons of Laurie’s shirt. Laurie, pinned firmly if gently to the mattress by Ralph’s weight, found his buttons impossible to manage, and tugged instead at shirt and undershirt, pulling them free of his trousers and slipping his hands under them, up the smoothly muscled expanse of Ralph’s back. Ralph paused in his intent actions to stifle a moan against Laurie’s collarbone at the touch, and then, with what seemed a tremendous act of will, sat back to help Laurie out of his shirt. His own had been rucked up under his elbows through Laurie’s impatience, and he pulled the whole over his head without investing much time in unbuttoning it. He was golden only at the throat and wrists, the rest of him pale. With the hair falling in his eyes he looked young and beautiful, an athlete crowned at the games: all the harsh edges of him were gentled, and Laurie felt none of the awe he had thought innate to Lanyon’s presence, no matter how well they grew to know each other, or how truly he claimed the title of a friend. They might have been boys together on an adventure. It felt absurdly reassuring, even now.

“Spud,” Ralph was saying with the sort of insistence that betrayed he had said it before, “Spuddy. We aren’t going to do anything you’re the slightest bit uncomfortable about.”

It was all specious, of course. Though he hadn’t grown much since school, nobody could properly look at Ralph and call him a boy. “Don’t stop just yet,” Laurie said with a grin, and got an answering smile.

Ralph clasped him close in his arms, and Laurie, for a moment overwhelmed by the sheer sensation of a man held so close, heart to thundering heart, could only clutch back and dot his shoulder, his collarbone, the lean swell of his bicep, with kisses. He had not thought to want this because he had never thought to obtain it.

Presently Ralph said, “No, let me look at you,” and leaned back to hold him at arms’ length, hands tight upon his shoulders. School and Oxford and the army and above all hospital had left Laurie with no trace of modesty and very little patience with men who clung to theirs. But there was a difference between undressing in a crowd of boys or men who scrupulously averted their eyes, and being only bare from the waist up under Ralph’s darkening gaze. Dressed in a way that in any other company of men would have been deemed perfectly respectable, Laurie found himself beginning to flush, embarrassed and hating it. He found himself also beginning to get aroused, his body having caught up with and set aside the turmoil of his heart.

Ralph felt it too, pressed close as they were at the hip, Ralph still straddling his legs, their thighs locked together. Felt it, and smiled a bright, sly smile. “I think I want to look at all of you. Will you let me?” Laurie nodded, a little bereft of speech.

Even now he was exquisitely careful of Laurie’s leg, easing his trousers and underpants off so that they didn’t even brush his knee, finishing with a fond pat on the foot. In anyone else at any other time—in Ralph at any other time—Laurie would have found the solicitousness irritating, even faintly repulsive, but the pat had changed to a caress, and Laurie found his breath hitching as Ralph trailed his hand up Laurie’s leg—his good hand, Laurie’s bad leg. It was a gentle, meandering touch, unmistakable for simple affection, and stopped at his hip. Ralph knelt up to hold Laurie between his hands, thumbs stroking at the thin skin in the hollows of his hips. “Tell me the moment you want me to stop,” he said and bent to mouth at his skin, pressing closed-mouthed kisses to his hip, the top of his thigh, the thin strip of skin joining his legs to his trunk, and finally sealed his mouth over Laurie in an obscene kiss.

For the first few moments there was no question of Laurie protesting: the sensation was too new and too alien to separate into desired or undesired, to even think of attaching value to it separate from its simple existence. Ralph was touching him, with such care and precision and _enjoyment_ , was putting his hands and his mouth on Laurie with such enthusiasm that the bare fact of it would have made him ecstatic even if his skin hadn’t been singing with the pleasure of it, his body twisting to meet Ralph’s mouth, wring more pleasure from every moment of it. Ralph came up off him, hands tight on Laurie’s hips to stop him from straining up after him, coughed harshly, and before Laurie had connected the two events, bent down again and swallowed him to the root. The world narrowed to Ralph’s mouth around his erection, Ralph’s tongue delicately probing the slit at its head. Held down hard enough that he would later find Ralph’s fingers blazoned onto his skin in an angry bruise, and pinned safely under his weight where he could do no harm to his leg, Laurie thrashed a little, tried to thrust up, and convulsed in ejaculation.

When he was aware again of more than himself—for in that splendid moment his body was better to him than a burden to be borne with gritted teeth and nonchalant seeming—he was aware of Ralph’s head resting high on his good leg, Ralph’s body curled around the length of it, the aimless casual way in which Ralph was petting him. The instant before he could reach out a hand to touch his hair, his shoulder, something, Ralph looked up with an open, bright smile. “Don’t worry, my dear, it takes some of us that way, I find. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re also a bit faint from lack of food, and the dope on top of that.” He scrambled to his feet, looking very masterful. “I’ll check the kitchen, there’ll be the cake if nothing else.”

 

Presently he came back bearing a tray. Laurie, once implicitly permitted to go to sleep had as usual found it impossible to do so. He was glad of Ralph’s return: the night had grown close and discomfiting and Ralph drew a gentler darkness into the room in his wake. After the intense embarrassment he’d felt some time earlier about being stripped to the waist under Ralph’s eyes, his nakedness should have mortified Laurie, but instead it felt entirely natural to push himself up on an elbow and watch Ralph enter the room. Something about his glance stopped Ralph short momentarily; Laurie watched, fascinated, as a shiver ran through him in the warm, close room before he closed the distance in two strides. When he set it down on the stripped divan, there was a splash of water on the tray that had slopped over from the jug. It was something to know, in a moment when he had been contemplating surrender with some complacency, that he exerted some power over Ralph in turn: however carelessly offered, an act of love had the nature of conquest, and there had been very little of desire evident in Ralph’s face and manner when he’d gone scavenging for supplies. That momentary hitch in his step returned a great deal of his self-confidence—never too high in such matters—to Laurie.

Ralph’s eyes tracked him as he sat up and reached for the tray. “You must have ransacked the kitchen to get all of that. I’d no idea there was any food in the house.” On the tray there was the end of a loaf of bread, a tin of potted meat that looked about half-full, and two slices of the wedding cake Ralph had stowed in the kitchen when he went looking for wine-glasses.

“There’s quite a bit more in the larder,” Ralph informed him. “But everything else would have needed cooking. You even have whole eggs.”

“We can get Mrs. Timmings to make omelettes when she comes in the morning,” Laurie promised fondly. Ralph was fussing with the water-jug, the cushions strewn on the divan, idle and haphazard and somehow very young. He wasn’t, Laurie thought suddenly, too much older than Laurie himself; three years at their ages was scarcely a gap worth thinking significant.

Ralph grinned. “I’ll make you those omelettes myself, if you’ll only apply yourself to your supper now. You’ve barely had anything all day.”

Laurie found himself abruptly ravenous. He had had a long day, tiring and emotionally tumultuous, and was barely equipped to deal with this latest onslaught. It was easier to lower his head and fill his stomach, and he did so for the next several minutes, eating with the good appetite and indiscrimination of the infantryman who has learnt to eat what and when he can. The bread was from the village bakery, and the potted meat of the brand his mother had been buying his whole life: if he paid any attention to the taste, after so many months of army rations and hospital food, he would be horribly homesick even sitting in the house where he had been a child and a school-boy. Last evening it had been easier to hold these thoughts at bay, with the wedding impending and Straike’s presence looming so unpleasantly large; now, with only Ralph in the empty house with him, it was harder by far not to feel terribly alone. He shook his head to clear the thoughts from it, and took a large bite of cake to keep them off.

When he looked up again it was to Ralph laughing softly at him. “You’ve a bit of the cream, just here,” Ralph explained, reaching out to flick at his upper lip. “It’s giving you the most absurd little moustache, hold still. There, that’s better.”

Ralph had used his left hand to swipe the icing from his lip, and was offering it up as evidence, still laughing. It was the first time he’d used the hand to touch Laurie, and it looked absurdly vulnerable: a mangled thing that recalled an earlier time of elegance. Ralph had always touched his knee with such quiet care. Impulsively Laurie lowered his head and sucked the one remaining finger into his mouth, licking it clean. Ralph made a choked sound low in his throat, and his thumb swept up to touch Laurie’s pursed lower lip, the dip above his chin, the curve of his lower jaw.

“ _Laurie_ ,” Ralph said, sounding wrecked. “Spuddy, don’t. It’s not...”

Laurie glanced at Ralph and slid his lips slowly up the finger. The single callus at the base of the second knuckle was smooth against his tongue and contrasted strangely with the roughness of the skin surrounding it. He held on to the hand after he’d let the finger slip from his mouth, and deliberately kissed the scar tissue terminating the others and marking the narrowed span of the hand.

Ralph said “Laurie,” again, with greater urgency, and pressed Laurie flat against the mattress, straddling his bad leg and kissing him fervently, holding him steady with one hand wrapped around his jaw. “Spuddy, Spuddy my very dear.”

In this mood it was impossible to resist Ralph. Laurie found himself instead urging him on, wrapping both hands about his upper arms and dragging him ungently down till they were pressed together from hip to toe, thighs entwined and Ralph’s erection hard against his hip even through the uniform trousers. Feeling already as though Ralph was devouring him whole, he discovered in himself deeper well-springs of desire. It seemed intolerable that Ralph should still be clothed. He worked a hand between them and opened and pushed trousers and underwear down his thighs. Ralph thrust against him, hips pistoning, and Laurie, who had imagined himself sated, felt an answering urgent throb. For a few moments they clung together, moving in instinctive rhythm.

Presently Ralph said, “Wait Spud, oh I know, but do,” and produced a handkerchief from somewhere. “Easier this way, you don’t want to have to explain the mess.”

The cotton felt cool to the touch, and did nothing to obscure the shape of Ralph’s hand tight around both their erections. In itself it was not too far removed from the autoerotic practices that their masters had clubbed under beastliness, but it felt very far from the childish thrill that had accompanied them. He had not thought of sharing this with anyone when he was a school-boy, least of all _the_ R.R. Lanyon, who had been a prefect when Laurie had been a third-former, and now lay gasping his release into the crook of Laurie’s shoulder.

After that it took only a little time for Laurie to come to completion. Ralph tipped his head up to buss his cheek and then nuzzled sleepily into the crook of his shoulder. “Spuddy,” he murmured. That set Laurie laughing, and brought Ralph’s head up again. “Was it so ridiculous?”

A question so patently absurd could only be answered with a kiss. It was some time before Laurie could say, “I was thinking of school, you see, and how Jeepers would have reacted to this.” It was as close to the truth as he wanted to stray. To talk of Hazell to a Ralph stretched out at his ease would be purest cruelty.

Ralph frowned, his brow ridging against Laurie’s cheek, and tipped off him to lie pressed close along his side. When he spoke his voice was devoid of the closed-off grief Laurie had feared. “I’m not sure it’s to the credit of the public school system that it’s created generations of men who can only think of school as the place where they belonged.”

To a stranger it would have worked as a throw-away line, even to the Laurie who had sat with Ralph in a hospital chapel scant days ago. But Laurie could feel Ralph’s muscles tightening all along the length of him, the trained body anticipating orders from the trained will. Such a confession deserved another. He said, “I’ve often had a feeling that there’s nowhere I really belong.” It gave him pause: till he had uttered the words he’d no idea he meant to say them.

Ralph said, very briskly, almost as if he was issuing orders that his will could transform into reality, “You belong with me. As long as we’re both alive, this will always be your place before anyone else’s. That’s a promise.”


End file.
